"Every 10-15 minutes we ran into the cell with screams and shouted that I was gay, that people like me should be killed. It was all intimidating," he told Novoya Gazeta, according to a translation. Lapunov said that many people were tortured in the cell where he was held before him, which he knew because "the cell was full of blood."

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Maxim Lapunov (far right) brave first witness to come forward about anti-gay purge in Chechnya. “I was sure they would kill me” pic.twitter.com/R1Jp8YKMKt

While there, he said, he was beaten with sticks on his hands and feet until he fell and said, "I was sure they would kill me." When his parents learned of his arrest, they also thought they'd never see their son alive again, according to a tweet from Lapunov's press conference.

Lapunov says relatives, inc old mother, knew he had been arrested: “They expected to pick up a corpse”

Lapunov isn't the first survivor out of Chechnya to tell stories of torture, but he's the first to put his face and name on his experience. He told the newspaper that he won't allow "a bunch of bastards," to drive him from Russia and said, the "only thing that I would like at the moment is justice."

When the arrests were first reported in April, a suspected more than 100 gay men had been arrested and three had been killed. As of July, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, still denies that violence against gay men is happening in Chechnya.